Get me off your fucking mailing list

November 23, 2014 8:23 PM

"Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" is an actual science paper accepted by a journal. Original Source.
posted by 445supermag (33 comments total)

Oh god. Academic journal spam *whimpers*.

I got a great one the other day - an "esteemed" published of scientific "ebooks" invited me to peer review a new book of theirs (in a field utterly unrelated to my own, of course). But they were offering me an incentive for my efforts. A free copy of the ebook I reviewed. So great.
posted by Jimbob at 8:39 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

You know, in a world where entire undergraduate educations are sold as scams from predatory companies, this is absolutely unsurprising.

Everything is a scam these days.
posted by edheil at 8:49 PM on November 23, 2014 [4 favorites]

To be fair, the paper does have a solid and coherent thesis. I rate it "excellent" as well.
posted by zennie at 9:05 PM on November 23, 2014 [15 favorites]

As a peer, I'd give it two thumbs up.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:07 PM on November 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

The graphs are the best part.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:08 PM on November 23, 2014 [8 favorites]

I'm shocked there's no acknowledgements section!
posted by invokeuse at 9:10 PM on November 23, 2014

I'd give it two fingers up, myself.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:11 PM on November 23, 2014 [3 favorites]

Best science paper I've read since Chicken Chicken Chicken.
posted by mmoncur at 9:14 PM on November 23, 2014 [24 favorites]

Chicken Chicken Chicken

Looked for jessamyn's name as co-author, was disappointed there was no chicken fucking.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:19 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

I tried to explain Chicken Chicken Chicken to some friends once, then just showed them the video. Even though we'd all left academia around the same time, those of us who'd concentrated in science, tech, sociology, anthropology, etc. were rolling ... and the rest of them just stared blankly at us. Academic humor: do not attempt at a party, the end.
posted by none of these will bring disaster at 9:28 PM on November 23, 2014 [19 favorites]

The scatter plot is what takes it over the edge into excellent, for me.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:41 PM on November 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

For a brief moment I thought the Chicken Chicken Chicken video would be Chicken Monkey Duck, that's a different thing entirely.

Now follow along!
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:42 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Wait they didn't send in the 150$ to have this published? That's crazy. These important findings must see the light of day. Let's take up a collection!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:47 PM on November 23, 2014 [3 favorites]

Did they take him off the mailing list?
posted by Segundus at 9:52 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

The references section is the cherry on top of this magnificent sundae:

References
[1] Editor J. Klensin. Simple mail transfer pro-
tocol. RFC 2821, AT&T Laboratories, April
2001.
[2] Editor P. Resnick. Internet message for-
mat. RFC 2822, QUALCOMM Incorpo-
rated, April 2001.

posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:00 PM on November 23, 2014 [13 favorites]

Where's the future research?
posted by el io at 10:30 PM on November 23, 2014

I like that the paragraphs are different lengths and everything. They actually put some thought into crafting this. And yeah, I know just how the authors feel and I hope this was cathartic for them.
posted by shelleycat at 11:32 PM on November 23, 2014

Kind of disappointed, I was already guessing which discipline would have a legitimate paper with that title. I thought maybe computer learning (profanity as Turing test/spam filter) or linguistics (although I couldn't quite see what would be novel there).

But still, those graphs!
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 11:52 PM on November 23, 2014

If and when someone does write that paper, they can cite this one in their references!
posted by otherthings_ at 12:31 AM on November 24, 2014

The response from the spammy editor is priceless as well:
"In response to a request for comment, the editor of the International Journal said via email: "This is your work, you are publish any where any time but another person publish this work is is fraud and copyright. So you are send me a camera ready paper and payment slip as soon as possible." The editor did not sign a name, but the journal's website lists its editor-in-chief as Rishi Asthana, professor of computer science and engineering at Manglaytan University. (The spelling is different from that of Mangalayatan University, in India.)"
posted by horopter at 1:33 AM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Love this:

Correction: This article previously said the article was published by the journal. It was only accepted, because the author didn't want to pay $150.
posted by Omnomnom at 3:10 AM on November 24, 2014

Many chortles.

Serious PSA for a minute. If you don't want to contribute to scum like this: Beall's list: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers
posted by lalochezia at 4:48 AM on November 24, 2014 [10 favorites]

I thought it was going to be about the sociology of those emails where someone accidentally cc:s a huge list of peopl, and then it's like three days of angry emails.
posted by empath at 4:55 AM on November 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

lalochezia, that looks a lot like my spam filter at work.
posted by wintermind at 5:30 AM on November 24, 2014

This stuff, and Chinese conference spam. Gah.
posted by carter at 5:58 AM on November 24, 2014

If it's actually normal academic practice to cite author's employers rather than the IETF as the publisher of RFCs, academic practice needs to be changed.
posted by Hizonner at 6:39 AM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

I understand you can be published in the online journal Metafilter for a $5 fee.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:03 AM on November 24, 2014

someone accidentally cc:s a huge list of peopl, and then it's like three days of angry emails

Did they ever find out who ate those bananas?
posted by Panjandrum at 7:11 AM on November 24, 2014

I was having a friendly internet debate with someone and they used an article from one of these journals to support a point. I explained that these aren't actually credible sources and I could not get them to back down so I abandoned the discussion.
posted by desjardins at 7:34 AM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

The references section is the cherry on top of this magnificent sundae:

The failure to cite

Zongker, D. (2006). Chicken chicken chicken: Chicken chicken. Annals of Improbable Research, 12(5), 16–21.

is a notable omission. I'm glad Google Scholar is keeping track of research that cites this important work.
posted by zamboni at 8:10 AM on November 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

The first author, David Mazières, is a CS professor at Stanford of some note. His group does some excellent security research. tcpcrypt is particularly interesting to me, a method to encrypt all TCP traffic on the Internet in a simple-to-deploy way. It's getting some traction in the IETF now, the TCPINC working group.

I used to be an academic, I left graduate school 15 years ago. I still regularly get spam conference and paper invites. They've even followed me to a new email address.
posted by Nelson at 8:20 AM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Hizonner: "If it's actually normal academic practice to cite author's employers rather than the IETF as the publisher of RFCs, academic practice needs to be changed"

I'm sure the editors would have caught that before publication.
posted by pwnguin at 9:13 AM on November 24, 2014

I certainly hope the authors accept one of their many offers to go to Shanghai and present this groundbreaking research.
posted by Dashy at 10:00 AM on November 24, 2014 [2 favorites]